Alrighty y’all so this is the first informational post in my palmistry post series, where I share my personal notes and information I’ve gathered through experience as a semi-professional palmist. The first post, Palmistry 100, is available here if you’d like to read it.
This post will be a bit long, so everything is available under the cut!
Okay so the first thing we’ll cover is which hand to read. Short answer? We absolutely read both hands. We do this to get a more complete and full understanding of someone’s personality. The dominant hand shows the outward personality, actions, and what they’ve done with what they were given, sorta like the sun sign in astrology. The non-dominant hand shows the more inner workings, someone’s inclinations, and more of their way of thinking/reflections, sorta like the moon sign in astrology. Think conscious versus subconscious. So what do we do if someone is ambidextrous? First, I ask them which hand they default to when it comes to writing. Most of the time, they will tell you clearly. On the rare chance that someone says they write with both, check the flexibility of their thumb—the hand with the less flexible thumb is their dominant hand.
That’s cool, now we know to read both hands, now what? How do we study this before going out into the world offering our friends and families readings? Because that’s a lot of pressure. Slow down there tiger, you’ve probably got a long way before doing an in-person reading, especially for someone with a lot of questions. The best way to study palms can be broken down into 2.5 parts.
Number 1, take a print! All you need is some paper and ink. Cover your hand in ink (one at a time of course) and push firmly into the paper. If done correctly, you should be able to clearly see the lines in your hands and even your finger prints and palmar ridges. Here’s an example:
Prints are fantastic for learning, because not only are you able to clearly see the lines and use them as a reference for study, but now you have a print that you can use to compare your hands in the future, because a lot of the lines in your hands will change over time. Having a print allows you to take your time when studying and learning to read palms, much better than asking your curious mom to check her palms and then getting a borage of “What do you see?” and “What does that mean?”
Number 2, pictures! Phone cameras have come a very long way over the years, and most people are able to capture a fairly good image of someone’s palm. The reason this is less preferred than a print is because not only will some of the minor lines and the palmar ridges be basically invisible, but you also won’t be able to measure the fingers against each other (which we’ll get into in a different post). That being said, they’re still a great resource to have, especially if you’re not able to take a print for any variety of valid reasons.
2.5? 2.5 includes pictures of celebrity hands, which can be found accompanying readings from other palmists sometimes, just like is done with celebrity astrology. I would recommend to ignore the other palmist’s reading and just study the palms, especially of the dominant hand, and try to match your findings with the way said celebrity portrays themselves, especially in interviews. For example, Hillary Clinton has a simian line, which in short, makes a lot of sense for her based on her career in politics. Jim Carrey has a long ring finger, sometimes known as the Apollo finger, which is found in a lot of people drawn to being the star of the room, and some people in the public eye like actors and comedians (and I’m not just saying that). You can also find plenty, and I mean plenty, of palm pictures on reddit, specifically r/palmistry, which I will absolutely recommend to beginners as a studying resource once you learn a few things to pinpoint.
So we’ve identified some great ways to get your hands on some other hands, which is fantastic. Learning to read for strangers helps you to build you objectivity when reading—it removes bias from your readings, which sharpens your knowledge on the topic.
In the next post, we’ll begin the discussion on the major lines of the palms, which is where I usually start my readings.
The wife of Gilbert Wright, Master of the Salters' Company in 1624, frequently consulted cunning men in order to find out whether she would outlive her husband, and there is some evidence to suggest that this was a common type of inquiry. In many cases it seems that the wish was father to the thought, and that the question directly reflected the tensions of an unhappy marriage. Thus when Dr Suckling's wife visited Mary Woods, the Norwich palmist, in 1613, to find out when her husband would die, she followed up her inquiry by offering the wise woman money if she would poison him.
